Jesse Darling Receives Turner Prize Nomination

The Turner Prize 2023 exhibition opens today at Towner Eastbourne, featuring a site-specific sculptural installation of new works by nominee Jesse Darling.   Darling's presentation for the Turner Prize—which aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art—speaks directly to the prevailing crisis and confusion present in Britain today.

 The work will capture all the complexity and strangeness of this moment, while embodying the playfulness and compassion that has been an enduring fixture of Darling's practice. His work has consistently anticipated and attended to the crises of care, the precarity of state infrastructure, and the parochialism of Empire. At the core of his work is a reflection on what it means to be human navigating the world we face today, in all its messiness.   

He was nominated for Turner Prize 2023 for No Medals No Ribbons, a major solo exhibition of work from the past ten years presented at Modern Art Oxford, 2022, as well as Enclosures at Camden Art Centre, 2022, an exhibition of new works resulting from the prestigious Freelands Lomax ceramics residency. Taking its title from the eighteenth-century Enclosures Act which ended the rights of common land, the exhibition reckoned with the ongoing privatisation of space and public services in Britain, and the way this has shaped the social landscape.